


Ain't as far as it used to be

by jestbee



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Extended Metaphors, Introspection, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Paris (City), Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25042267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jestbee/pseuds/jestbee
Summary: Paris is different than he expected, and Dan can't lose the thing chasing him.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 27
Kudos: 71





	Ain't as far as it used to be

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this moodboard](https://midnightradio.tumblr.com/post/622569150035918848/in-comes-the-morning-haunting-us-with-the-beams) made by midnightradio on tumblr 
> 
> It's way more introspective than I intended, and there was no attempt to make the metaphors subtle, but it's 2am and I apologise for nothing
> 
> Also if you do science please don't come at me, I know it's wrong but it's pretty and this is fiction

The coach is underwater when he thinks he might have made a mistake. 

Staccato lights strike across the walls of the tunnel and shine in the corner of his eye like guilt. Chasing him even while he runs away. 

-

He meets Phil on the first night. 

Drinks in a cramped hostel, students crammed into one room with too much alcohol and not enough inhibitions. 

"What made you want to come here?" Phil asks him, and Dan can't think of anything worse than responding. 

The truth tastes wrong anyway, after so long. 

But Phil's mouth tastes nice. His skin is salty from the heat and Dan chases the tang down under his shirt collar. Phil lets the question drop when Dan suggests they go back to his room, and it doesn't cross Dan's mind to ask the same in response. 

Dan scored a room to himself. There are two single beds with matching scratchy blankets but no one had wanted the other one. One by one people had paired off on the coach ride, struck up conversations and forged new friendships, like they were supposed to, but Dan had kept his headphones on and his eyes downcast and the bed stands as evidence of how good he is at avoiding the things he finds difficult. 

Phil isn't a friend. He's nothing much at all except someone with pretty eyes and soft, delicate hands, but he looks good spread out on the scratchy blanket and he mumbles words that Dan needs to hear, so Dan doesn't kick him out straight after like he should. 

He isn't a friend, but he's there. 

-

There's a halting shuffle the morning after. They blink through matching headaches, wincing at a newly formed day behind a window with flimsy curtains. 

Dan rises to shower off that thing now back in the corner of his eyes and tells Phil not to be there when he gets back. 

-

As far as stupid decisions go, the exchange had been one of Dan's larger ones. 

Paris is warm, and nothing like Dan had thought it would be. 

His first day is spent following a tour guide down the escalator of the Louvre, cowering from the sunlight beating through the glass pyramid and watching the gallery below reveal itself as he slips into it. 

Like everything here, there are things he recognises but a lot that he doesn't. Paintings he's only seen on his computer screen are a lot smaller than he'd thought they'd be, like his perception of the world has been turned on its head and that isn't what he'd intended for this trip to teach him at all. 

They're set free in the afternoon. He doesn't have an idea of where to go but finds himself along the river. His body doesn't feel like his own and he's still trying to parse everything in its new configuration, to put himself in the context of a world where this is who he is and these are the things that he does. 

He turns his head when things creep up, his peripheral vision mocking him with the thing that follows him everywhere. 

He walks until his feet hurt, crosses the river once and then back again. 

He returns to the hostel in time for dinner, still alone and with the world still looking strange. 

Phil nods at him from between two people. He's smiling at something they said one minute, fully engaged and interested, and the next he's looking away to catch Dan's eye, ignoring the people still waiting for his reply. 

That isn't what Dan wants at all. 

He can't have people looking at him while he's still trying to work out how to see them back now that everything is different. They too seem to be much smaller than he imagines them. 

Dan loads food onto his plate and goes back to his single bed and the scratchy blanket that now smells like someone else's skin.

-

Dan shouldn’t let Phil in when he knocks. 

It's deep into the night but Dan isn't asleep. He's staring at the sky through his window and wondering just how many stars here are different to the ones he can see back home. 

A better person would turn Phil away when his hand quietly, timidly, knocks on Dan's door. But Dan tugs him in through a gap barely large enough for him to fit, and lets him stay just long enough for the stars to disappear again and for Dan to stop thinking about them. 

-

Dan's days go like this. 

He wanders some tourist trap, his overzealous tour guide talking a mile a minute while Dan allows the words to wash over him. He looks, and he takes in the things that he should, but the only thing he learns is that the closer he examines things the more different they are from what he'd expected. 

He tries not to expect things, but he's never been any good at it. 

In the afternoons he wanders. He doesn't have an agenda, or a list of places he needs to see like everyone else. He has a playlist, and something chasing him, so he needs to keep moving. 

The river is the only constant. The water reflecting the sky like there isn't all that space between them, like the sky isn't made of all that vapour anyway. 

It's all just atoms, in the end. Sky and River, Dan and his guilt. They are all the same, a part of each other and yet not at all. 

Phil isn't a constant because Dan doesn't see what use it would be if he were. He's the person who asks questions like "what did you do today?" And "why do I have to leave?" And Dan is the person who ignores them. 

Then Dan lies under the scratchy blanket and stares at the empty bed on the other side of the room, snatching a few hours of sleep before it all starts again. 

-

When the first week is over, the weekend looms. There's no tour guide at the weekend, and Dan has heard just enough of everyone else's plans to know that he isn't interested in participating. 

Saturday finds him back at the river, the sky reflected back, considering his atoms and wondering precisely which ones are guilty of making him do the things that he hates. Of being scared. 

The river takes him as far as he'll let it. Boats pass, more tour guides talk quickly to people who crane their heads and look toward him. He knows they aren't looking at him, why would they when there is so much else to look at? But still, he moves on quickly. 

It might be nice out there on the boat. The wind would be in his hair, the water gently rocking him from underneath. He could be, for a brief moment, part of the river-sky amalgamation, thrust his atoms in amongst it and disappear. 

Dan doesn't get on a boat. He heads back to the hostel instead, empty and quiet, and takes the opportunity to pile his dirty clothes into a bag and heft them onto his back. 

-

The laundrette is just as quiet as the hostel. The overhead lights are stark and cold while the summer heat still creeps in through the door, a creaking fan in the corner no match for its intensity. He squeezes his clothes into a machine with French instructions he has to translate on his phone, slips unfamiliar coins into the slot, and then waits. He sweats through his shirt, head lolling, stuck in the quiet and the heat all alone because he chose to be that way. 

-

Phil doesn't appear until Dan's clothes are in the dryer. 

He should be surprised about it, or at the very least annoyed, but he isn't. 

Phil looks at him as he comes through the door, holding his own clothes over his shoulder. He's always looking at Dan, looking without really seeing for the most part, but Dan still hates it. 

"Didn't expect to see you," Phil says. 

"Why would you?" 

"I should," Phil says, and doesn't explain himself any further. 

Dan doesn't ask him to.

Phil puts his clothes in the machine. He doesn’t use his phone to translate the instructions, but neither does he separate out his whites, just bundles them all in together and puts the required amount of money in. 

He sits on the bench next to Dan without being invited. 

"Not out partying with everyone else?"

"I guess not." 

"Me either," Phil says, as if Dan can't see him sitting there with his own eyes. 

Phil's skin is pink. The bridge of his nose is glowy and freckled, like the sun has found a place to rest there. More atoms mixed up together. 

"Hot, huh?" Phil says. 

Dan might hum a bit of agreement, or he might ignore it completely. He won't remember later. 

What he will remember is the heat of Phil's thigh against his. The curve of his bare kneecap below his shorts and how Dan still feels like that is something he isn't allowed to linger on for too long. 

"Hey, you want to go somewhere?" Dan says. 

"Not really." 

Phil's eyes are blue and yellow and green. They are swirled together like watercolours, atoms on atoms. A bit of something from everywhere, all mixed up into his own unique arrangement, but still individual. 

"It could be fun," Dan says. 

"Probably," Phil agrees, easily. "But you could, you know, stay." 

"Why?" Dan asks. And he honestly wants to know. He wants to know why people stay, how they can stand it. 

"Because I'd like you to," Phil says. 

Dan's clothes come to a stop in the machine. The night stretches on and the heat climbs up his neck until he feels claustrophobic and trapped. 

He stays. 

-

When they get back to the hostel, bags over each of their shoulders and so much of the night left for them, Dan pauses at the door to his room and assumes Phil will follow him inside. 

Phil brushes his thumb over the spot below Dan's left eye. Slowly, like there's something there he wants to see. 

With Phil's thumb in his peripheral instead of the other, awful thing, Dan sighs with the relief. 

It catches him off guard when Phil presses their mouths together. Dan's body sways closer, fingers curling in the fabric of Phil's shirt. When Phil steps back, Dan's fingers refuse to unfurl and he embarrassingly, desperately, keeps clinging.

"Goodnight, Dan," Phil says. 

Dan prises his hand away, loosens his grip to let Phil retreat down the corridor and Dan lingers for a moment, the one watching Phil for a change.

-

He doesn't see Phil the next day. He doesn't see anyone. 

Dan sinks down in a river of his own making, coming up gasping and sucking in lungfuls of sky every once in a while.

The blanket is still scratchy, the bed on the other side of the room is still empty, and the thing in the corner of Dan's eye is bigger than it ever was. 

-

On Monday, Phil knocks on his door again. It's early morning. Dan hasn't yet decided whether he's going to continue treading water or if he's going to get up, but Phil appears with a knock stronger than the one before and Dan finds himself shoving his body into clothes and following him out into the sunshine. 

"Thought we could skive today," Phil says. 

Dan doesn't ask what they will be missing, just barely nods his head and squirms at the way Phil's eyes don't leave his face. 

They walk without the river to guide them, but Phil seems to know the way. Dan's steps aren't long, but Phil is happy with the pace and he doesn't ask Dan too many questions at first. 

They walk along a street with large, worn cobbles, duck down around a row of houses with shallow balconies and flakey, painted shutters. A single awning adorns a door, an old man zips past them on a bicycle. The world is still as it was, as it has always been Dan is coming to realise. Dan can just see it now. 

The street opens up into a small square banked by shops along one side and grass on the other. Beyond, there is a road and then the trusty river winding its way through the city. Dan breathes a little easier. 

Phil takes him to a restaurant on a corner, stretching along both sides of the intersection with large windows. There are seats outside, set up with plates and forks and neatly printed tablecloths. A friendly host seats them at a table meant for two and Phil says something Dan doesn't understand. 

"Dan?" Phil says. 

"Hm?"

"What would you like?"

Dan catches the host's eye and he realises they are both turned to look at him. 

"Oh. Coffee?" 

Phil does the thing where he says something Dan doesn't understand again and then they are alone. 

"You speak French?" Dan asks. 

"Really badly," Phil says. "Only what I learned here."

"You picked up a lot in a week."

Phil smiles, small and amused. "I've been on this exchange three times before," he says. 

"Oh." 

Dan catches the tablecloth between his fingers and runs the hem against the edge of his thumbnail. 

"Oh?" 

"Yeah I just…" Dan pauses to consider what it is he wants to say. "Doesn't it get boring? Doing the same thing over and over?" 

The edge of Phil's brows, near the centre, twitch. He turns his head to look out over the street, at the people walking past, and gestures with his delicate, pale hand. "How could any of this get boring?"

Dan looks too, wondering if Phil sees things the same way he does. Wondering if, perhaps, what atoms _are_ is just a matter of perspective. Maybe looking at a thing makes it what it is, maybe when they aren't looking, it is something else entirely. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all.

"Every time I come I find it a little bit different. Or I am a little bit different," Phil continues. "Nothing really stays the same for long." 

"Like the river," Dan offers, not knowing whether Phil will understand what he means. 

Phil looks over his shoulder at the water rushing past. It's slow, rippling a thousand glints of morning sun from bank to bank. 

"Exactly," Phil says. "I've sat right here a lot of times, but I've never seen that exact river twice."

The waiter arrives with their coffee. There's a bowl with sugar and a small jug of cream and all the cups match, a delicate trail of blue flowers running along the rim. 

Phil is looking at him again.

"Do you always look at people so closely?" Dan asks when the waiter is gone.

The edge of Phil's spoon glances off the edge of his cup with a metallic ring. 

"I don't know," Phil shrugs. "Do I?" 

"It feels like it," Dan says, honestly.

"You looked at me first," Phil says. 

Dan thinks back, and has to concede. "That's true. But it wasn't like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you—" Dan looks at the river again. A boat sails past, the muffled voice of the tour guide floating over the distance. "Like you want to know me, or something." 

Phil draws his attention by taking a tiny sip of his coffee and flinching when it is still too hot. 

"If you say so," Phil says. "But that's not how I remember it."

They do see things differently, Dan thinks. There's no other explanation.

-

Dan lays in bed that night with the blanket now gone. They'd swapped the sheets by the time they got back and now there's something softer and thinner that doesn't smell at all like the scent of Phil's hair. 

They'd spent the day wandering down streets, and Phil had walked him as near to the base of the Eiffel Tower as they could get without paying a fee and they'd tipped their heads back to look at it. 

"Is it what you thought it would be?" Phil had asked. 

"No," Dan had said. "Not at all." 

If Phil noticed Dan wasn't talking about the same thing Phil was, he didn't let on.

On the way back to the hotel, Phil's hand and brushed the back of Dan's. It was deliberate, all subtlety lost to the blanket of the encroaching dusk, and Dan had slipped his fingers between Phils without thinking.

He's staring at it now, holding his palm aloft above his face and squinting at it in the dark. 

Do atoms transfer? Is he carrying tiny pieces of Phil with him now where they touched? He touches his fingertips into the groove of his life line, wondering how much of Phil lingers in there and for how long. 

This won't do. 

He jolts out of bed, skidding into the hall and counting doors until he reaches the one that Phil disappeared into earlier. 

There had been another kiss, another surprise that made Dan want to hold on tight for some god forsaken reason. 

He has never wanted to be known like this, to be looked at, and yet he knocks on Phil's door with no hesitation and speaks as soon as it is opened. 

"You look at me and you see something, but I'm not sure it's the same thing I do," he says. 

Phil blinks behind glasses Dan has never seen, and his mouth moves around empty space before he can find the words. 

"I hope so," is what he says when he does.

"What?"

"I hope I see something different," Phil explains. 

"Why?"

Phil puts a shoulder against the doorframe, leaning his weight against it. "Isn't that the point?" He asks.

Dan is broken. He's possibly always been a bit broken, and running away from any and all reminders of that doesn't suddenly make him fixed. He can look at the world in any configuration, and maybe he'll never get a grasp on it, not when it's always changing. 

But so is he. And he doesn't just have to have his interpretation, does he?

"I'm scared nothing will ever be like I expect it to be," Dan says. 

"I hope nothing ever is," Phil says. "You certainly weren't." 

Dan doesn't offer Phil any response to that. He doesn't try to work out what the right perspective is because maybe there never is just one. Atoms move constantly, shifted and changed and made into something else just by where they are in the universe. Dan can be like that too. Or at least, he can try. 

Phil melts when Dan's hand touches his neck. He goes easily under Dan's hands, pouring himself out onto the new blanket, plastering them together, atom to atom, until it doesn't much matter which ones belong to each of them. 

And Dan doesn't need to perceive anything to know that it exists.

-

On their final day in Paris, Dan steps on to a boat. It undulates beneath him, his body moving with it. He's crammed into a tiny plastic seat, Phil squashed in alongside, and the tour guide stands at the front, speaking into a headset that sounds from the speaker next to them. 

Dan doesn't know what he says. 

Phil's hand is in his, the sky stretches out above him, the river below, and Dan is a part of all of it. He turns his head, trying to catch a glimpse of what lurks in the corner of his eye, but for once there is nothing there at all.

**Author's Note:**

> [reblog on tumblr](https://jestbee.tumblr.com/post/622581128429174784/aint-as-far-as-it-used-to-be)


End file.
